Listless Cavs drop fourth straight

Coach Mike Brown said
his team didn’t fight in a 100-79 loss to the Nets.

GATEHOUSE NEWS SERVICE

CLEVELAND — Empty seats and a few thousand disinterested fans made for a quiet Quicken Loans Arena by 9:25 Tuesday night.

Two-plus hours of the home team showing little fight and chucking too many jump shots has a way of sucking the life out of a crowd, even one that once numbered 19,838.

It also has a way of infuriating a coach.

Cavs Head Coach Mike Brown did not hold back his anger after watching his team, minus LeBron James, take a 100-79 beating at the hands of the New Jersey Nets.

“I did not see us fight, simple as that,” Brown said. “It’s not about, they ran this play that kicked our behind, or that play that kicked our behind. They kicked our behind, and that’s what I’m disappointed in more than anything. I didn’t see any toughness, any grit as a team out there.”

And with James missing his third consecutive game because of a finger injury, Brown saw something else he didn’t like.

“I thought we as a team felt sorry for our ourselves,” Brown said.

He has seen his team band together and win without James before.

“If he’s out, we’ve got to at least fight, and that’s what we’ve done in the past,” Brown said. “And that’s what’s disappointing to me ... we didn’t fight. We flat-out gave in.”

Cavs forward Drew Gooden said the team did not have the proper attitude to compete.

“I think we rely a lot on LeBron James,” Gooden said, “and [when] we don’t have him, we can’t just sit back and wait for him to get back and say, ‘We’ll be all right once he gets here.’ We’ve got to do something now.”

The Cavs (9-10) lost their fourth straight by shooting poorly and not defending. In all three games without James they have shot under 40 percent, including 34.6 percent Tuesday. They settled for 47 shots from 16 feet or beyond, making just 15.

“We came out flat, we settled for jump shots, we didn’t look to attack,” Brown said. “That right there set the tone, and it carried on throughout most of the ballgame.”

Defensively, the Cavs allowed the Nets to shoot 51.5 percent from the floor.

Richard Jefferson scored 36, Jason Kidd grabbed 10 rebounds and Vince Carter had seven assists to go with 19 points. The Nets, leading 47-43 at halftime, opened the second half with a 9-0 run to take control for good. The Cavs scored just one basket in the paint during the entire third quarter.

Outside of some jumpers and a few drives by Shannon Brown and Daniel Gibson, the Cavs found little offensive success all night. They moved and passed, but too often the ball still remained 20 feet away from the hoop.

Brown gave the Cavs an early lift in his first start. He hit his first four shots, two from 3-point range, scoring 10 of the team’s first 16 points. He finished with a career-high 20 points on 8-for-16 shooting.

“The last couple of games I got my legs under me a little bit and started to get into a little bit of a flow, and it just felt good out there today,” he said.

Gibson added 17 points, while backup forward Dwayne Jones showed some fight in grabbing a season-high 12 rebounds. He also scored a career-high nine points.

But Mike Brown was not about to pull out bright spots. He knows what he wants to see tonight from the Cavs on the road against the Washington Wizards, regardless of whether James is back in the lineup.

“I’m looking for the team to step up as group and get it done,” the coach said. “In the past, we’ve been put in tougher situations than this ... and one thing we did is, we fought. We fought as a team.”